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Whipped Cream Cake
Another cake to be eaten while fresh. Make the sponge cake No. 1, baking it in two layers and spreading between the layers and on the top, whipped cream.
Chopped nuts or candied cherries may be added to this filling very pleasantly.
This is a finishing instruction rather than a standalone recipe: it borrows the book's Sponge Cake No. 1 and turns it into a filled layer cake. The hinge is the cream, which is both filling and frosting and will not survive being made ahead.
- The cross-referenceYou need the book's own sponge cake batter, baked in two layers rather than one loaf or tube. Any plain sponge or genoise batter scaled for two 8- or 9-inch round pans works in its place.
- Oven and time for the layersThe recipe specifies neither temperature nor time. In a modern oven, shallow sponge layers are usually baked around 350F for roughly 20 to 25 minutes, less than a deep sponge needs. The layers are done when the top springs back and the edges just begin to pull from the pan.
- Cool completely, and mean itWhipped cream slumps and weeps on warm cake. The layers must be at room temperature, ideally chilled, before any cream touches them.
- The cream itselfCream in Estes's day would generally have been unhomogenized, and the fat content of what a professional kitchen bought is not recorded. Buy heavy or heavy whipping cream at 36 percent fat, and avoid ultra-pasteurized if you have the choice, since it whips to a looser, grainier foam. A cup and a half of cream gives about 3 cups whipped, enough to fill and top two 9-inch layers.
- Sweetening and stabilityThe original leaves the cream unsweetened and unflavored, which is defensible against a sweet sponge; a tablespoon or two of sugar and a little vanilla is the modern default. Whipping to firm peaks, or folding in a spoonful of confectioners' sugar for its cornstarch, holds the foam together somewhat longer.
- The additionsThe book puts the nuts and cherries in the filling, and that is the better place for the nuts anyway, since slicing drags them if they sit on top. Candied cherries are sticky and can bleed; blot them and quarter them, or they will streak the cream pink.
- Serving window"To be eaten while fresh" is the whole instruction. Assemble within a couple of hours of serving, keep it refrigerated, and treat leftovers as a next-day proposition at best. Serves 8 to 10.
Good Things to Eat (1911) was written by Rufus Estes, born enslaved in Tennessee in 1857, who cooked for the Pullman Palace Car Company and later for the subsidiary of U.S. Steel in Chicago. His book is unusual for its period in being self-published by a Black professional chef, and it reads like a working cook's notebook: recipes cross-reference one another, and a base preparation such as Sponge Cake No. 1 is reused several ways rather than rewritten. A cream-filled layer cake belonged to that era's category of cakes eaten the day they were made, which in a household or a dining car meant no shortcut around fresh cream, hand or crank whipping, and cold storage. Sweetened whipped cream as a cake filling is often said to have spread through American baking over the late nineteenth century, a shift usually attributed to commercial dairies and home iceboxes making reliably cold heavy cream something an ordinary kitchen could count on.